Chapter 6 – Still Not Alone
Day 3 – 16th, Last Seed
The sky had not changed since we turned in. Had Raziel not woken me, I would never have been able to tell it was morning. I sat up, bleary-eyed and groggy. I'd barely slept at all, but we couldn't afford to lose the morning – walking was easier before the heat of midday, and though the ash clouds made it difficult to see, we were thankful that they kept the warmth trapped beneath them when darkness fell, but stopped the sun from scorching us during the daytime.
A strangely warm breeze tugged at our clothes as we packed the tent away, and from Raziel's dubious glances in the direction of the mountain, I could tell that this was not a good sign.
"Wear your helmet today," she said, when I questioned her about it.
We set off along the path, still heading inwards, until we came to a long rope bridge across a wide foyada. I hung back as Raziel stepped onto it – it swayed and creaked under her weight, but the ropes held fast, and by the time she turned to see where I was, she was nearly halfway across.
I couldn't see her expression clearly from where I stood, but when her voice, muffled by her helmet, floated across to me, it was full of exasperation.
"Are you coming?" she called, tapping her foot. I meekly followed, though I kept my gaze planted firmly on my feet. Raziel turned back to the other side, about to carry on, but stopped in her tracks. Not properly looking where I was going, I nearly collided with her.
"Hold it." She stuck an arm out to steady me, but she was still staring at the other end of the bridge. I followed her gaze, puzzled.
"Are those… people ?" I squinted over Raziel's shoulder at the congregation on the opposite bank, scarcely daring to believe that we weren't the only ones on this side of the Ghostfence after all.
Something about them bothered me, though. A few of the figures stumbled around as if in a daze, while another clutched his head and fell to his knees. None of them wore packs, or protective gear like ours. An inhuman wail reached our ears, making the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Raziel nocked an arrow.
"Get ready to run," she warned, and a second later, the figure tumbled over the edge of the foyada, stirring up a trail of dust as his corpse rolled down the side and landed at the bottom, her arrow piercing its neck. My mouth dropped open in shock.
" What do you think you're–"
" RUN !" Raziel had nocked another arrow, but the other figures had heard her and were running towards us, their bare feet churning up the ashy soil in their wake. When I saw their wide-eyed, empty gaze and the festering boils that covered their bare flesh, my limbs felt as though they had turned to scrib jelly. Raziel glanced back over her shoulder at me and groaned.
The bridge lurched violently, answering her with a groan of its own. It sagged under the weight of the creatures, but they kept advancing, and now I heard their ragged, agonised breaths, saw the thin trails of spittle gleaming at the corners of their mouths.
Raziel swore and unsheathed the dagger she kept in a sheath on her belt, holding it out in front of her like a warning. Our assailants ignored it.
"Hold on to something," she commanded, and somehow I willed myself to move, to tear my eyes away from the advancing creatures and fumble around for a decent handhold.
The bridge twisted and jerked as she sliced cleanly through the brittle support ropes on one side. One of the creatures went hurtling over the side, its swollen fingers clawing the air. Its wail cut short as it hit the ground far below, just as its fallen comrade had. "Don't let go!" Raziel barked, and cut the rope on the other side. The bridge lurched again. Our attackers' wails echoed in my head long after they hit the ground.
We stayed as still as we could, the bridge shuddering under our weight without the support ropes to keep it steady. It was onto the frayed and dangling ends of these ropes we clung, not daring to move for fear we would snap the whole bridge in two. It was Raziel who spoke first.
"Well, now you've seen what the Corprus disease does."
She said it so matter-of-factly that I had to glance away. The subject of Corprus was a volatile one between us. Before we left for Vvardenfell, Raziel had taken the liberty of describing to me in great detail – in terms far more graphic than the watered-down books I had read – the effect of the disease on anyone unfortunate enough to contract it. Her stories chilled me to the bone, but I made a show of shrugging it off. What a fool she must have thought me.
A keening cry rose up from the foyada below. One of the creatures was still alive, trying to pull his broken body up on skeletal arms.
"Can't we do something?"
"The only thing to do is kill them before they infect anyone else." With some difficulty, Raziel managed to nock an arrow without tumbling over the side of the bridge, aiming down at the creature through the gaps in the planks.
"Wait!" I started forward, forgetting our precarious situation in my haste to stop her. The bridge tilted dizzyingly. Raziel's hand darted out and grabbed my wrist, and for the longest moment I hung there, dangling by one arm from a swaying, broken rope bridge, with only a red-eyed mercenary between me and a painful death.
I shut my eyes and prayed.
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Chapter 7 – A Change in Fortune
"The sensible thing to do would be to turn back," Raziel commented when we finally reached the other side of the foyada. She tossed away the empty bottle from her levitation potion. It shattered against a rock. "We're halfway through our potion supplies, and the scrolls won't last forever."
She spoke the truth. We had used our healing potions to treat all kinds of minor injuries so far, a twisted ankle here, a leg scraped open on a rock there – mostly on my part, I admit. And now we had to waste two more potions of levitation out of my foolishness. This was only the third day since we left Ghostgate. We had at least a week of travel ahead of us.
"I want to press on," I told her firmly, wishing I felt as confident as I sounded. "If we get into trouble, we can always teleport back to Ghostgate. I want to see this through to the end."
"We had better keep our eyes peeled, then," was all she said. Behind her helmet I could imagine her frowning.
The ash storm hit that very evening. The sky turned a menacing, bruise-like reddish-purple just as we reached the Ghostfence once more, and the air became so thick with ash we could barely see an arm's length before our faces. Despite our helmets, even breathing became a battle, as the wind blew the ash into every nook and cranny it could reach.
The shadow of some Dwemer ruins appeared like a phantom out of the thick air, and grateful for any semblance of shelter it might offer, we stumbled towards it, blindly at times, our eyes streaming from coughing that wracked our bodies.
The Ghostfence disappeared into the murk. Straying from our path was by no means our first mistake that day, but from that moment onwards, something in our luck changed.
The bridge was too big to provide effective shelter – the wind simply howled right through the arches. However, the entrance to the ruins lay just on the other side, the half-moon shaped doors blown back on their hinges, so we stumbled across and piled through them, into the groaning building. Raziel heaved the doors shut behind us, gasping with the effort. The wind might have slammed them back as if they had been made of paper, but it took all of her strength to close them.
We sat there in the darkness, listening to the echo of debris clanging off the metal walls, and the rumble of distant machinery below us. So, I thought, perhaps I would get to see the remnants of Dwemer culture after all. I couldn't quite bring myself to feel triumphant.
"Are you hurt?" Raziel's voice was clearer now, for she had pulled her helmet off and tossed it aside. I did the same as she fumbled around for her tinderbox. The wind had blown both of our lanterns out.
"No, I'm fine." Raziel's face appeared out of the darkness, ghostly-green and flickering in the orange light from her sputtering lantern. She glanced me over and nodded, satisfied that I was telling the truth. The gesture reminded me so much of a strict hospital matron that I burst out laughing. Raziel blinked her red eyes at me, and her expression of confusion just made me laugh harder.
Rather than trying to sober myself up, I welcomed the distraction, though my lungs still burned and I soon collapsed into a violent coughing fit. It is only now that I'll admit I was nearly hysterical.
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Chapter 8 – Painful Reminders
Day 4 – 17th, Last Seed
The ash storm was still raging when I awoke, though judging by the snores coming from the other side of the entrance chamber, it was not morning yet. Both of our lanterns had burned down, and it took me several minutes of stumbling around in the darkness to find the tinderbox again. I woke Raziel in the process, and she glared blearily up at me from her bedroll. She was still cross with me for the night before. Apparently madness is one of the first symptoms of Corprus disease, and Dunmer consider hysteria to be one of the first symptoms of madness.
"You really are mad," she said bluntly when I explained to her my plan of exploring the ruins, which I would later learn were called Bthanchend. It took several hours of pleading before she gave in, more out of her own curiosity than my skills in persuasion.
Since neither of us had set foot past the tiny chamber we were using as our camp site, Raziel scouted on ahead to check for mechanical sentinels I had read about in books. Though she had assured me fiercely that she was not prepared to go up against them in battle, she told me we might be able to sneak past them.
She returned a short while later, a finger pressed to her lips, and beckoned for me to follow her, down a flight of metal stairs into the main building. After a while we came to a pair of doors, and Raziel held out her hand and leaned over to whisper in my ear.
"Listen," she said, and I did so obediently. For a while all I could hear was the building creaking and shuddering around us, but beneath the racket came a faint metallic grinding noise.
"What is that?" I bent closer to the door to listen more closely, one hand outstretched, about to rest on the door so I could place my ear against the metal. I barely even thought about what I was doing, but Raziel darted forward with a cry of alarm.
"No, you fool! Don't touch-" she never got to finish her sentence, as a blistering wave of heat shot up my arm and I was thrown backwards against her.
I must have blacked out, for the next thing I knew Raziel was bent over me, dousing my hand in water from her drinking flask. Crumpled on the ground beside her were the remains of my scorched sleeve. When I tried to speak, as soon as I opened my mouth a dizzying wave of nausea rippled over me, and all that escaped was a moan. Raziel thrust a potion into my other hand.
"Drink this, quickly," she ordered. Too weak to argue even if I had wanted to, I drained the bottle in one go. "The trap you set off burned your hand pretty badly. Luckily you fell on your side and smothered the flames." I didn't feel lucky. My head spun, and my hand felt as though it was still on fire.
"It hurts," I croaked pathetically. I expected Raziel to snort, or tell me to pull myself together. Instead, she handed me a rolled-up length of parchment. I didn't have to unroll it to tell what it was.
"If we get you to a temple healer now, it might not even scar," she said when I pushed it away. "You're in pain."
"I'll survive." I forced out between gritted teeth, but I could already see that Raziel was not going to accept this.
"Is this excursion really worth more to you than your life? You're not going to even make it back to Cyrodiil if you carry on like this, let alone write your book. You'll need hands for that, in case you weren't aware." I had to smile despite her snippy tone. Since she was being sarcastic, I figured I was in no real chance of dying from my injuries – although with Raziel one never could tell.
After another hour of trying to browbeat me into ending my journey, Raziel eventually gave up, and settled for mixing up a thick paste from our medicinal supplies. It was gritty, and stung agonizingly when she rubbed it on, but she assured me that with crushed Aloe Vera leaves from Cyrodiil, Marshmerrow and Black anther, it would sooth even the most painful burns.
That was another thing Raziel taught me about the Dunmer people – their general attitude when it comes to medicine is 'everything gets worse before it gets better'.
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Chapter 9 – Exploration
Day 5 – 18th, Last Seed
I remained in the entrance chamber after that, trying not to think about my scorched hand or how far we had yet to travel before our supplies ran out. The wind showed no sign of abating, which made my mood even worse. Raziel grew sick of my moping after just a few hours, and disappeared back down into the ruins, resurfacing every so often to remind me to me something of interest she had found and ask if it was worth anything. As she worked her way deeper and deeper through the complex her visits grew less frequent, until I finally snapped out of my mood long enough to begin to worry about her.
She appeared, looking bedraggled but self-satisfied, just as I was about to go and search for her. In her arms she carried a heavy-looking Dwemer blade, which I thought was the reason behind her grin, but she shook her head and beckoned for me to follow her.
"I managed to find a way around those trapped doors, without having to risk breaking through them," she explained. "I also found the source of that noise we heard before." My interest sufficiently piqued, I followed behind her, though this time I kept my hands firmly to myself.
The corridors grew hotter and more humid as we descended, though they all looked so similar it gave the impression they went on forever, right down into the heart of Red Mountain.
"We're getting close," Raziel assured me, and then added, coyly, "You'll like this."
She finally stopped in front of a similar pair of doors to the one I had burned myself on. The noise was louder now, and the floor shuddered under our feet. A shiver of excitement ran through me – this was the same thing I had felt from outside the first ruin we came across. Raziel leant on the doors with all her weight, and as they swung heavily inwards, the noise grew to a roar. "Don't touch anything," she warned. As if she needed to tell me.
We emerged into a round, hot chamber, the air thick with steam. Through the haze, however, I could see wheels turning and pistons pumping, every bit as exotic – and absurd – as I could ever have imagined.
Even more unbelievably, whereas the corridors we had just traversed were cloaked in darkness, this chamber was lit flickeringly with a sickly yellow glow from what looked like glass bulbs set into the walls.
"Incredible," I breathed. Aware that Raziel had been expecting a somewhat more dramatic reaction, but feeling too overwhelmed to think of anything profound to say, I settled for the obvious. "This is Dwemer machinery – and it's still running!"
"How are they still working after so long? Do the guards keep them running?" Raziel looked genuinely interested.
"I believe the Dwemer harnessed energy from deep within Red Mountain. We're standing on volcanic ground, after all. Perhaps the heat from the molten rock under the ground provides the power to keep the machines running by themselves." I told her, pleased to know something she did not, for once.
"Is that even possible?" she wondered, wide-eyed.
"Indeed it is – the steam escaping from those pipes is produced by hot water. I'd say the Dwemer built these machines to pump water from down far below the ground to a place where heat turns it to steam, which in turn drives some kind of generator and produced all the light and heat they could ever have needed." Though these theories were by no means my own, Raziel fell silent and gazed at me with such admiration – an expression that seemed as foreign on her face as a guar in a pottery shop – that I admit I couldn't quite bring myself to tell her I had read it all in a book.